Methods for defending against an atmospheric release of chemical or biological munitions are still a new and developing art. The prior art includes other methods to detect and assess damage during warfare. For example, Christianson et al. in U.S. Pat. No. 4,827,414 disclose a method for detecting a nuclear weapon explosion and for assessing damage caused by the explosion. The system comprises a sensor head for detecting predetermined signals which are characteristic of different nuclear explosions and an electronic signal processor connected to the sensor head for processing the detected signals. These processed signals provide thermonuclear blast data of the nuclear explosion.
The United States Army Chemical Research, Development and Engineering Center has also developed tracking methods, an example of which may be found in a computer program entitled Non-Uniform Simple Surface Evaporation, Version 4 (NUSSE4). The NUSSE4 computer program performs some of the required computations in estimating the dispersion of chemical munitions. These computations include detailed meteorological condition estimation of the Monin-Obukov length, surface roughness, length and friction velocity, Lagrangian time scale and turbulence intensities, rate of cloud expansion with time, droplet shape and terminal velocity, and droplet Sherwood number. NUSSE4 also computes wind profile and estimates ground temperature.
NUSSE4 has drawbacks in actual operation. The program input requires the user to have extensive knowledge of chemical agent and munition parameters. Output is in tabular form which requires further processing to obtain meaningful results. NUSSE4 is also incapable of reading meteorological conditions and provides estimations on the dispersion of only chemical munitions. NUSSE4 also cannot be used on personal computers.